This Rangers prospect is proving Draft critics wrong

This story was excerpted from Kennedi Landry’s Rangers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

ARLINGTON -- Midway through June 2020, Evan Carter was sitting at home, locked down like the rest of the world because of the pandemic. COVID-19 halted the outfielder’s senior season at Elizabethton (Tenn.) High School.

Carter was expecting to head to Duke University, where he had a baseball scholarship waiting. But the Rangers shocked the baseball world by taking the outfielder in the second round of the COVID-shortened MLB Draft.

Despite being taken with the No. 50 pick, Carter was not listed on MLB Pipeline's Top 200 Prospects or Baseball America’s Top 500 entering the Draft. Various other lists did not include him either. Draft pundit after Draft pundit admitted to not having heard of Carter live on air.

Just 17 years old at the time, Carter heard it all.

“I’m thankful that it worked out the way that it did, and the Rangers took me,” Carter said. “I’m really happy to be where I'm at now. But obviously, at the same time, you get to watch people on TV say they don't know who you are, and all that and I should have gone to college, this, that and the other. That's fine, you know. We're here now, we're chugging along. So I’ve been really thankful that it happened the way that it did.”

He has good reason to be thankful.

All those people who didn’t know Carter before are surely aware now. Now MLB Pipeline’s No. 6 overall prospect, Carter was the Rangers' Minor League Player of the Year in 2022. He slashed .295/.397/.489 with 21 doubles, 10 triples, 12 home runs, 28 steals and 73 RBIs between High-A Hickory and Double-A Frisco last year. He also won a Minor League Gold Glove Award in center field.

Just a year later, he’s arguably even better. Since coming off the injured list from a nagging hand injury on June 21, Carter has hit .337/.439/.600 with a 1.039 OPS in 25 games in Frisco. And he admitted the hand injury -- which he suffered after being hit by a pitch in May -- affected him more than he realized.

The only thing that has really slowed Carter down since his professional debut in 2021 has been injuries. When healthy, he’s one of the best.

“The competitive side of me definitely doesn't want to stop playing,” Carter said. “But I probably should have taken that break [with the hand injury] well before I did. I was just trying to keep playing and play through it. It's encouraging though at the same time, just to be like, 'Hey, whenever I’m healthy and ready to go, I feel like I can be a productive player.' So it's a good skill to learn, to know about your body and what it feels like.”

The Rangers knew they had something in Carter. Maybe not to this degree, but they believed in their scouts and Draft group to be confident in the pick. Rangers senior director of amateur scouting Kip Fagg added he believes the pandemic allowed Carter to slip past some of baseball's best scouts and become a secret the organization kept.

“Every time you make a pick, obviously you think that the guy is going to be good,” Fagg said. “But I had a lot of conviction with Evan just with the kind of kid he is more so than the player. We saw him play enough, but it was the kid himself, I knew. Josh Jung is like that. They have very similar traits. Very focused, don't really care what you think of them and they're really focused on what they want to do.

“I understand some of the criticisms at the time, and sure, nobody knew who he was. I get it. But we did our work, and our process was really good. I feel -- maybe vindicated isn’t the right word -- but I feel so happy that it turned out this way.”

Assistant general manager for player development Ross Fenstermaker wasn’t involved in Carter’s scouting process but pointed to specific indicators that signaled the outfielder could be what he’s become. He’s athletic, that much is obvious. The natural skill set is a good start, but Carter is also intelligent and driven to be the best player he can be.

“He has the right amount of confidence and assertiveness and belief in what he does, but also curiosity and open-mindedness to be measured,” Fenstermaker said. “There's just a lot of factors that are in play that once you get to know that person, you see why he’s performed as well as he has.”

But Carter doesn’t want to just be a top prospect. He wants to be a big leaguer.

And while the center fielder isn’t really into setting goals for himself -- “goals are dangerous,” he said -- he’s aware of the 180 the industry has done on him since the Draft. He’s become a consensus top-10 prospect in all of baseball and he sees what the big league club is doing in Arlington. He wants to be part of it.

“I try to just let things play out as they do,” Carter said. “I just try to control what I control and whatever happens after that happens. ... I guess the end-of-the-road thing you want to happen is getting to the big leagues and helping win a World Series, obviously. Sooner rather than later would be great. But you never know when it's gonna happen. So we'll just keep on rolling.”